Walker leaves CAA for partner post

Agent joins Sloss, Nathan at Cinetic Media

Longtime film agent Bart Walker is leaving CAA’s Gotham office to join John Sloss and Robert Nathan as a partner at Cinetic Media.

Walker will represent clients in a new management division of Cinetic, which assembles financing and film packages for filmmakers and investors.

Several of Walker’s clients have films unspooling at the Toronto Film Festival, including Julie Taymor (“Across the Universe”), Tamara Jenkins (“The Savages”) and Julian Schnabel (“The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”).

Walker is also selling Schnabel’s documentary “Lou Reed’s Berlin,” plus two Japanese-financed films by client Wayne Wang, “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers” and “The Princess of Nebraska.”

For the last three years, Walker has worked at CAA, with a client list that included John Turturro, Mira Nair, Tamara Jenkins, Sofia Coppola, Jim Jarmusch and Francis Ford Coppola’s American Zoetrope. Before that, Walker spent 13 years with ICM, rising to head of the tenpercentery’s New York motion picture department.

Walker resigned from CAA Thursday morning; it is unclear how many of his clients will remain there.

Sloss and Walker have been friends for 20 years. Sloss said the two share a vision for how to create a new model for indie film financing and distribution.

“There’s an evolution going on in the industry,” Sloss said, noting that the biz is “moving away from the monolithic studio control. Everything will be more atomized, from financing to production, even to distribution. Companies like ours that are agile are in a perfect position to serve and take advantage of these changing models.”